Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Despite the titles of the best-known works on the subject, in the period under discussion here, there never was such an event as “the Russian Civil War.”1 Rather, as the title of this volume indicates, a plethora of multifaceted wars swept across and beyond the Russian Empire as it collapsed at the end of the First World War and was then refashioned as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the subsequent years. Some of these wars involved battles—political and military—between various Russian political and social groups, but others were between Russians and the many non-Russian former subjects of the tsar (particularly in the Baltic region, Poland, Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia), while still others involved few, if any, Russians, and were contested between the non-Russian minorities of the old empire (notably, the Ukrainian–Polish War and the struggle between Azerbaijan and Armenia). In the purely Russian wars, contending views of politics and economics were at the fore, but in the other “Russian” civil wars, elements of nationality, identity, and religion were added to the equation. Amplifying this was the fact that the former imperial Russian space (or at least its peripheries) became the object of foreign intervention on a tremendous scale: both the Central Powers in 1918 and the Allies from 1918 to 1922 dispatched tens of thousands of troops to theaters as far flung as Odessa and Vladivostok and Arkhangel’sk and Ashkhabad. At the same time, the conflicts in the former Russian Empire leached across its borders into Poland and Galicia, Turkey, Persia, China, and Mongolia.2 So to designate these events as a singular and discrete “Russian Civil War” is clearly misleading.

The time frame of the struggles discussed here also strays from the norm. Being focused primarily, if not exclusively, on the battles between the forces of the emergent Soviet state (the “Reds”) and their conservative opponents (the “Whites”), previous studies have tended to limit their coverage to the period in which that struggle reached its zenith (roughly 1917/1918–1921/1922). Herein, having recast the events as a matrix of overlapping and sometimes parallel wars that were as much about the collapse of the tsarist empire and the construction of its successor, the USSR, as they were about the rise of Soviet socialism and the demise of Russian tsarism, conservatism, and liberalism, the chronology of this historical dictionary is correspondingly broader. In this volume the opening salvos of the “Russian” Civil Wars are detected in the major uprising against tsarist rule that occurred in Central Asia in the summer of 1916. Likewise, the wars’ terminus is regarded as June 1926, when the last Red front (army group), the Turkestan Front, was placed on a peacetime footing as the Central Asian Military District.3

If the geographical and chronological scale of the “Russian” Civil Wars was unusual, their costs were unparalleled (except, perhaps, by the still uncounted “cost” of the vicious wars in China from 1927 to 1949): between 1917 and 1921 alone, at least 10,500,000 people lost their lives during the struggles with which we deal here; many millions more were maimed, orphaned, or widowed; and at least 2,000,000 former subjects of the tsar were pressed into foreign exile.4 As the most active fronts of the “Russian” Civil Wars began to die down, in 1921–1922, at least another 5,000,000 people then perished in a horrendous famine across the Volga–Urals region, the North Caucasus, and Ukraine that was in large part precipitated by the previous years of civil-war-induced chaos. And several tens of thousands, at least, of other people were then killed in battles and anti-Soviet uprisings—mostly in Transcaucasia and Central Asia—before the upheavals reached a temporary quietude around 1926. Consequently, the first complete (“All-Union”) Soviet-era census, which was conducted in that year, identified 147,027,915 citizens of the newfound USSR—where without world war, revolution, and civil wars (and taking into account the loss of the former imperial lands of Finland, the Baltic, Poland, Bessarabia, and other territories), it might have expected to have found at least 175,000,000 and perhaps more.5